


And These are Mine to Misunderstand

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode Tag, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-28
Updated: 2008-08-28
Packaged: 2017-10-11 22:51:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The light is diffuse, unspeakably beautiful, a soft gold that Meredith wants to wind around his fingers. He reaches for it, tries to trap the waves between his small palms, wriggles and laughs when the light bends and slips away from him, maddeningly playful, preferring to dapple his skin than be caught. Pursing his lips, he concentrates, grabs again, pleasure making him crow with delight when his arm and his hands do his bidding; such a new thing, this want that can summon response.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And These are Mine to Misunderstand

"I keep seeing a face, every time I close my eyes. I think it's my mother. I don't – I don't recognize her. . . .so long ago. She's saying words to me. I don't know them." ~ Rodney, _The Shrine_.

  
*****

The light is diffuse, unspeakably beautiful, a soft gold that Meredith wants to wind around his fingers. He reaches for it, tries to trap the waves between his small palms, wriggles and laughs when the light bends and slips away from him, maddeningly playful, preferring to dapple his skin than be caught. Pursing his lips, he concentrates, grabs again, pleasure making him crow with delight when his arm and his hands do his bidding; such a new thing, this want that can summon response.

Then she comes into view. Meredith loves her – this moving, murmuring, smiling Other whose hair catches light the way his tiny hands cannot, whose body smells of some fierce belonging, who presses her mouth to his elbows and makes him laugh. "Little man," she says, "awake so soon," and Meredith squeals when she scoops him up, makes him fly, settles him into the crook of her arm and strokes the curve of his head so that his eyes flutter closed before opening again.

The world is larger when seen from her arms, a mish-mash of passing blurs, bright one moment, subdued the next. She sits with him curled against her and his belly grows full, his body lax with contentment, his chin sticky with milk, and when she lays him against her shoulder, he burps with such force that she begins to laugh. "That's my boy," she whispers, and he turns his face toward her voice, awkwardly knocks his head against her neck. She lets him rest there while they rock.

Then come the words – marvelous things that rise and fall, washing over him, a thousand hypotheses to brush against his skin. Someday, he knows (somehow) he'll understand the meaning of this music, these bursts of song that she breathes with a hand curled gently around the curve of his skull, rocking him into drowsy submission, filling his head with the lyrics of a world he can't yet imagine. He blows a bubble against her skin and she smiles, lifts him up again, flies him back to the soft place with the comforting walls, the warm blankets, sets him down and talks a while longer, waits for his eyes to close.

*****

"Un, deux, trois," says his mother, and Meredith frowns at her, reaches forward and knocks down the blocks, grunting unceremoniously at the destruction. They've been over this – the ordering of things, the sounds that mean more than and more than; one, two, three; and these new words are not correct, don't correlate to one block and more, and he growls when his mother sets down a block again, smiles at him, says "Un." He scowls, flails a hand and pulls the block toward him, _mine_ in action if not in word; _one_ ; a good block, a single block, a block from which things might be built. "Un," says his mother again. "Deux, trois."

Meredith kicks at the block, _one, one_ , and wishes the sounds she makes were _his_ sounds, that he could tell her what he knows, but – "NO," he manages, and his mother covers her mouth, surprised. "NO," he says again, and he smiles, suddenly, when she starts to laugh, when she slides her hands beneath his arms and hauls him up to kiss his face.

*****

Mer peers into the basket where the little person's lying, staring at him with big blue eyes, kicking her feet beneath the blankets. This, he thinks cautiously, is what a sister looks like – bald and small and like she might wiggle into trouble at any minute. He leans in further, gives her a sniff – she doesn't smell bad; mostly powder and a little pee. She can't help that, he supposes. She's just a baby.

The baby seems very interested in him – she blinks at him and wrinkles her nose, then grumbles a little bit, ends her thoughts with a squeak. Mer blinks at her – he doesn't speak baby; he doesn't know what the grumbling and the squeak mean, but she's not red-faced and crying so it's probably something good. "Hello," he says solemnly. "Remember me? I'm y'brother." And she lets out a high-pitched squeal that might mean yes and might mean she's not very fond of whatever's making that smell in her blankets. Still, she doesn't cry, so Mer waits around a while, listens to her noises. He doesn't understand, but that just means he has something to learn. Jeannie burps; Mer sticks out his tongue.

*****

Rodney stares at the photographs on the wall behind the principal's desk. They're stupid, all of them, badly composed and some are out of focus, and anyone who has such an all-encompassing fascination for wolves and bears probably shouldn't be in charge of a school. He slumps in his chair a little more and squints at the filing cabinets. Filing cabinets are always so _ugly_. Why do people make them in institutional gray?

Beside him his mother's talking to the principal, and the principal's saying lots of things in return, none of which make very much sense. It's not like Rodney hasn't explained. If he's hearing things right – and things have been said for more than half an hour now, to him, down the phone, to his mother – it's inexcusable for him to have pointed out that his teacher was wrong. But that's nonsensical – his teacher was _wrong_ , and there's no earthly reason he should have stayed quiet and allowed a wrong, wrong, very wrong teacher to teach _wrong things_ to a classroom of marginally interesting seven-year-olds and himself. (Though he supposes the other seven-year-olds got less interesting when they just stared at him with open mouths and didn't join in with his analysis of all the _wrongness_.)

He sighs, which seems to be a sound hard-wired to the principal's blood pressure, because he turns very red and says, "Perhaps Meredith's father should be called."

And that doesn't make any sense either.

*****

He's fourteen years old, thank you for asking, and he's been preparing for this moment for the better part of his life – he understands the importance of the college experience and the accompanying potential for intellectual and personal growth. The desk tucked beneath the window is already groaning with the weight of his textbooks, and he's itching to draw up a schematic of study schedules and moments when he might be able to steal more lab time between classes and necessary pauses during which he'll eat.

Still – he hadn't actually considered the ramifications of this move, he realizes now, because his mother just said "Goodbye, Mer," and it's incomprehensible. He can feel his mouth working, but nothing's coming out, and his father slaps him on the shoulder, says "Don't fuck it up too badly," and leaves. _That_ makes sense – the expectation that he will fail spectacularly is the marrow of his relationship with his father, but "goodbye" is madness. Mer swallows and frowns and still no words come.

"It'll be okay," his mother says, and she hugs him briefly, touches his face, smiles at him with all the wonder on her face that she's ever shown him, that she's showered on him since he was small. But now she's leaving and – "I'll call," she says, and Rodney waves a hand, feels his eyes burning, stands in his dorm room and stares at the emptiness around him with a low, sick feeling spreading deep in his gut.

He grits his teeth and turns toward his textbooks. The first chapter's written for morons, and the world settles steadier beneath his feet when he realizes he knows its contents already, knows the numbers it offers and the curlicue safety of certain types of brackets, knows the waves and particles that make up light.

*****

He probably shouldn't be sitting cross-legged in the dirt, he realizes with some newly muted part of himself; he probably shouldn't get his dress pants muddy, and he probably shouldn't stay until it gets dark.

"Mer?" Jeannie says, coming to stand beside him. She's lanky and awkward, pale in the half-light of dusk, paler yet thanks to the black of her coat. "Mer, c'mon, I should take you home."

He looks up, squints at her, but he can't turn her words into anything meaningful. "Home," he repeats, because sometimes when he does that, people think he's listening.

"Yeah, home," she says, squatting down beside him. He watches her coat drag in the dust and he frowns, tries to brush the dirt away as if it's remotely important. "Mer."

"It just – it's not," he says, swallowing awkwardly, staring at the place where her knee's pulling the dark gray hose she's wearing to a lighter shade. "Home anymore." He pulls in a breath and it hitches embarrassingly.

"There's cake," she whispers, pressing her forehead against his and thumbing the hair over his ear, a halting gesture of comfort. "We'll get cake and go sit on the roof."

"Freezing," he murmurs.

"Yeah? So, we'll freeze," she says, pulling back just enough to nod at him firmly. Her eyes are shining with unshed tears.

Rodney nods back at her, worries the sleeve of her coat between his fingers. "Doesn't seem possible, that's all," he manages, letting her help him to his feet. "Doesn't seem possible that – "

Jeannie finds his hand, squeezes it. "You and me now."

Rodney reaches out, lays a hand on his mother's gravestone. "Yeah," he murmurs, and he doesn't know how he does that either.

*****

"You're getting _married_?" he yelps, incredulous.

"Yeah," Jeannie says, and she's actually glowing, fading in and out of the sharp dimensions of all things quantifiable, straddling some breach in the sense of things with him on one side and Caleb on the other. "We're going to start a family, buy a house – we're going to . . ."

"And – and your work? Your – you've been doing – your . . ." Rodney blinks and reaches for the corner of his desk, an old wooden relic abandoned by dozens of researchers before him. It's out of place within the sleek mathematical lines of his workplace, but it feels like a refuge; old books and a leather couch.

"I can still work. Or I can pick it up after my kids are born, or when they're older or, you know, pretty much _anything I want_." She frowns at him, disturbingly attentive as always; he can feel himself being sized up and measured. "It's not like it was when mom and dad got married," she says at last.

Rodney flinches like he's been struck. "That has nothing to do with anything."

"Oh, please," Jeannie says. "Mom's the one who taught you physics and chemistry and coached you in calculus. _Dad's_ the mediocre number jockey, and you wish she'd . . ."

"I'm hardly standing here wishing that mom hadn't _had us_ ," Rodney snaps.

"Yeah, but you're standing there thinking I'm making a mistake," Jeannie says, hands on her hips. "You think I'm doing what she did, giving things up for – "

"She was brilliant! You're - _you're_ brilliant, you both . . ."

"Jesus, Mer" Jeannie swears. "I'm _brilliant_ enough that I can figure out what I want and when I want it, and I'm choosing Caleb and family and – wait a second . . . wait a goddamn second, you think Caleb's like _dad_? Is that the other part of this? Because he's – "

"I barely know the man," Rodney sniffs. "And this has nothing to do with him."

"It really kinda does," Jeannie retorts.

"The point _is_ ," Rodney continues, "that you've made great strides in cracking the quantum distortions of – "

"I don't want this!" Jeannie interrupts. "I don't want long hours in a lab and numbers and computers and other people who have nothing else to keep them going! I want a _home_ , Mer, and I want to keep loving the people I love, and I want to – "

Rodney closes his eyes, shakes his head a little. "I don't understand any of this," he says. "I don't understand."

"Well, that's the problem," Jeannie says, grabbing her bag and shoving the strap onto her shoulder. "In a nutshell." She leans in and kisses him roughly on the forehead. "You know where I am."

And then she's gone.

*****

He's been living in Atlantis for weeks now, but this maybe the first time he's truly contemplated that fact, lying in an infirmary bed while machines record evidence of his mulish vitals. The personal shield that caused so much stress and no small amount of glee lies spent on the bedside table. It looks like a turtle now, and Rodney stares at it, throws half-thoughts and scattered twists of numbers in its direction, trying to figure out how to make it cool again.

"Hey," Sheppard says, jerking his chin in greeting as he ambles up to Rodney's bed. "How're you feeling?"

Rodney looks at him, tries to calculate the ratio of duty to curiosity in Sheppard's visit. "Okay," he offers. He gestures at the shield. "I think I broke it."

"Better than it breaking you," Sheppard says and scratches his chin; Rodney can hear the rasp of stubble against callused fingertips, and he frowns at the way his brain's already, without a conscious order, cataloging that sound away for future reference.

He shakes his head to jog his brain back to usual function. "Wouldn't have broken me," he says. "I mean – all that business with the food and drink was just . . . " He hitches one shoulder and stares at his blanketed feet. _Cowardice_ , he thinks, but he'd rather not say the word out loud.

Sheppard drags a chair up to the bed, sits down and kicks his feet up on Rodney's mattress. "Pretty gutsy, going into that cloud thing," he offers, folding his arms.

Rodney looks at him, blinks, and tries to process the thought. "Huh?" he says.

Sheppard hitches a shoulder. "It's not like you knew what would happen."

"Well, no, not specifically, but the general parameters of what we uncovered earlier in the day suggested . . . "

"I shot you," Sheppard says, smirking with something Rodney's pretty sure is pride.

"Yes," Rodney agrees, and there's suddenly a grin on his face. "Yes, you did."

*****

There's a conversation happening right in front of Rodney, and he's damned if he can make out a goddamn word. He pulls in a breath, the way Teyla's taught him to do when his mind runs so fast that it leaves him in its dust; pulls in a breath and exhales slowly, picks something to focus on so that his brain can slow down.

Elizabeth – Elizabeth's standing right in front of him, he's staring at her back and she's in uniform, she's in charge, she's doing her in charge thing where she talks and makes decisions and threatens, in every indirect way she has, to fuck someone up if they don't come around to her point of view. And the someone is Kolya, hovering on a video monitor, looming in close-up, and no one was ever meant to have that much detail about the man's issues with his pores. They're talking, Kolya and Elizabeth, switching back and forth, lobbing tight, mean words across the fullness of space, and Rodney can't understand a thing that's being said, not a word, not a tone, not the strained foreign quality in Elizabeth's voice or the baffling stretch of Kolya's arm. He's sure he's said something recently – he can feel the burn of absent words, no longer heavy his tongue – but his vocabulary's inadequate for this situation; it's only with effort that he can remember the mechanics of standing still.

On the monitor, Sheppard's bound and gagged, the expression on his face a treatise on bravado, and Rodney knows with a sick and violent certainty he'll stay silent no matter what the Wraith does. He wishes he could speak for both of them, order everyone to stop with the quiet force of Elizabeth's rage, but all he can do is bear witness; lay up a store of disbelief and fury that he hopes will supply his weapon with a sure and lethal aim.

*****

He's thirty-nine years old, cantankerous, arrogant, often irritated, frequently impatient, more comfortable with dark matter than the vagaries of human interaction, arguably obtuse in interpersonal matters, frequently scared, hungry, brittle, and resigned to it all. But Jeannie wants him home for Christmas, and Elizabeth says he's loved, by all of them.

That is absolutely fucked.

He's sitting on the pier, feet swinging over the ocean, and if he looks up he can squint at stars that will never resolve into Roman heroes and twisted Greek gods. It's as good a place as any to consider that he's loved, that they love him; team and family; but it's a puzzle that will not fix itself, like an inexcusably mutilated Rubik's cube with the colored squares pulled off and stuck back on again in random order; like a double entendre slipping from Ronon's lips. It requires beer to contemplate, and he's three in by the time Sheppard sits down beside him, cracks open a can and slurps too loudly for someone who's not pushing five.

"Miller," Sheppard says with a wince.

"Yeah, fuck you," Rodney says without rancor, and pulls at his own. "You're the cheapest date in the city, and you know it."

John's mouth twists up in a smile. "Enlightenment suits you," he offers, and Rodney punches him in the arm, snorts a little when John brays a midnight version of his utterly stupid laugh.

*****

To Be Thought About Until Solved / Rendered Comprehensible (Appendix X, Week 220)

> 1) Lack of hot girls in Sheppard's subconscious  
> 2) Kavanagh – existence thereof etc.  
> 3) Dark Matter (still)  
> 4) False positive on simulations for traveling to (and from – crucial) alternate realities – particular focus on coding; lines 14, 29674, and 73172483  
> 5) Would the taste of chocolate diminish subject's enjoyment of chocolate if chocolate looked like green apples EGGS AND apples  
> 6) Colonel's propensity for invading privacy  
> 7) The word 'picayune'  
> 8) Could pennies be used as a low-range frequency modulation device to . . . if people carried pennies rather than . . . no need to know the contents of tip jars and ostentatious fountains; further thought.  
> 9) Gravity (still)  
> 10) If , then . . .  
> 11) Jeannie safe; self not dead; Todd alive; Sheppard [_______]?  
> 12) Can P-90 be retrofitted with naquadah shard to . . . good or bad?

  
*****

Rodney isn't asleep when John knocks at his door, a knock that quickly escalates to thudding and the repeated use of his name: "Rodney. _Rodney_."

"What?" he asks, baffled, as the door slides open and John stumbles inside. John looks great – looks like _John_ , looks like someone he'll be seeing _every day for the rest of his life_ – except he actually looks ragged and pale and slightly manic, and Rodney finds himself reaching out, steadying him with a hand beneath his arm. "What?"

John just stares at him, breathing hard, then pulls a face, eyebrows, mouth headed in opposite directions. "I just . . . I was just checking."

"Checking?" Rodney says, carefully. "Checking what?"

"That you were – that. . . that you _are_ , that – " John waves a hand and then scrubs his face with it. "Shit."

Rodney pulls him further into the room so that the door can close again. "Are you okay? I mean, I think in these situations it's more common for the person who _hasn't_ been subject to a degenerative disease to ask that question of the person who _has_ , but I'll waive that requirement considering . . . " He blinks at the expression on John's face. "What?"

"You were – on your way out," John says.

Rodney squints at him. "No, no, I was thinking of going to bed, actually, but I'm finding it hard to . . ."

John shakes his head. "No, I mean – slipping. Away." He grimaces, looking pained. "Crap, I really shouldn't have come."

But Rodney tightens his hold on his arm, suddenly panicked for reasons that are gaining on him fast. "I'm sorry – I didn't even think about . . . I mean, I thought about it, especially at the Shrine, I was so _angry_ at you when you wanted to say goodbye then, there, and I had twenty-four hours, you told me, a day, and I just . . ." His words peter out; John's staring at him again, expression broken open, and Rodney feels himself gape, comprehension like a stunning blow to the back of the head - graceless, mean, and hard. "Oh. Wow."

"I just . . ."

"Really?" Rodney asks softly. "Really? You – "

John drops his head, scratches the back of his neck, looking like he wants the city to swallow him whole. "I guess. I mean – yeah. Look – this was stupid, I can . . ."

"Oh, no," Rodney says, and steps right into John's personal space, because suddenly everything makes sense, the past few days snapping into sharper focus, and John's face is warm, his skin rough against Rodney's palms, but his lips are soft, closed and soft, and when his mind catches up with his body, his breath hitches and he shudders, leans into Rodney, opening his mouth and kissing back.

Words and feelings are so stupidly hard to predict, Rodney thinks, hard to prepare for, a feedback loop of feeble telemetry, evidence of little but gaps and spaces between objects in elliptical orbit. He's never understood, not when it's counted, and that he can parse the halt and stumble of John's words now is nothing short of miraculous, a linguist's gift shoved into his hands. "Stay the night," he whispers into John's unruly hair, "stay with me. Here." And he understands; understands the shiver that vibrates beneath his palms, understands the huff of breath against his jaw, the shift of a thigh against his thigh.

"Yeah," John says. "Yeah, I can . . . I can stay if you like."

And Rodney blindly seeks out his mouth again; he doesn't know the words.


End file.
